Monday, October 12, 2009

I found this on ChaiGyaru's blog, who in turn found it on Nira Chan's blog, and I totally feel her. While I currently have a man to lean on, and I know he won't be perfect, I still find myself wishing on occasion that some of these things would come easier to him...

I want a man, not a boy. ♥

a man who knows how to appreciate the things I do for him.a man who pampers me with something money can't buy.a man who knows his mistakes and tries to make it right.a man who can be my pillow whenever I need someone to lean on.a man who knows when to give in and let down his pride.a man who’d communicate, listen and respond.a man who respects me, my family and his. a man who enjoys what life has to offer. a man who cansay yes or no instead of ‘anything’.a man who won’t keep me waiting though the day or night. a man who(at least) try figure out what’s going on inside me and resolve it. a man who help the relationship work when it gets tough.a man who'd never lay his hand on woman.a man who works hard and planning well for his future.a man who is motivated.a man who takes responsibility for his actions a man who gives me freedom that I need.a man who loves me with no doubts.

I would also like to add that I want

a man who knows and understands that a woman will usually associate sex with love.

a man who believes in a Higher Power and would acknowledge that sometimes, there are things beyond any measure of human control.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

I found out from one of my trusted sellers in Multiply that she's offering a personal shopping service from Japanese stores. Now that I'm leaning heavily towards the gyaru style, I'm going nuts because this is the chance to own something, ANYTHING by Cecil McBee, Gilfy, Swordfish, Ego System, Liz Lisa... OHMYGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD.

Unfortunately, I still owe some other sellers money. And I just finished investing quite a heavy sum in retail treasury bonds, so I have absolutely skint. DX

Not to mention that I feel incredibly guilty since there are so many people out there currently living worse off than I am due to Typhoons Ketsana and Parma, which attacked our part of the country in the last 2 weeks.

I just want to go for it SO badly though...! T.T

God, please, I would like a windfall right about now. Please? I've been really, REALLY good! T_____________________T

Saturday, October 10, 2009

These qualities and situations I have always desired for a VERY long time. I'm doing my best to work on these, but I wish some of them would come to me more easily. The others, well, they are what we call "suntok sa buwan" ... literally "a punch at the moon," the best English transliteration being "aiming for the moon." I am hoping and praying that they don't feel that way for very long though.

Longer weekends. As long as they are announced a week early and not sooner.

Longer vacation days, so I don't succumb to the stress of my occupation and thus burn out easily. *looks meaningfully at her PR agency, which she loves but sadly doesn't offer more than 1 week's vacation at the most*

Better eyesight. Glasses can be a pain even with the meganekko/girls with glasses/girl geek-nerd trend being big right now. If by some miracle I either suddenly possess enough tear glands which will facilitate immediate healing after eye surgery, or I just suddenly wake up with a marked improvement to my eyesight, I will be forever grateful. The only reason why I could not qualify for the surgery is because I can't cry - and because I can't cry, I can seriously go blind instead of heal during post-ops for the eyes.

Handwriting that's reasonably easy to read. Ever since I was a child, I practised, but I could never get it right. I think I've just given up now because it's just so hard to conform my fingers into those words. X_x

Infinite patience. Enough said.

Retaining my capacity to sing. Once upon a time I had such a beautiful voice. ;A; I should start sleeping early though, but still that's kinda hard considering we have so many things to do at work and even get calls so late into the night... =_=

Superior PC tech skills so I can finally reformat, reprogram, rewire and revamp my PC without worries. (I am trying to practise but I always get it horribly wrong. DX)

Superior make-up skills so I can do my own make. I mean, I AM getting there... but I wish I could be with it a bit faster, y'know?

Superior styling skills so I can maximise the clothes I currently have and fit them into the current trends, instead of seeing all the pretty but trendy new ones that are being sold right now.

The ability to discern which of my clutter stays in my room, and which goes.

Superior cash and credit management skills so I can finally ensure my future.

Superior business acumen, because I have inherited absolutely none from my perennially business-minded mum.

Superior sewing skills so I can DIY my clothes and finally sew my own costumes. Alas, I am currently "sewing machine killer." XP

The capacity to forgive.

More courage and humility to ask for forgiveness from others.

More self-control. This means prudence over my spending, moderation in my eating, restraint over my reactions, and particularly shutting up instead of talking, because obviously I have no bone of tact and diplomacy in my body. That way I wouldn't need to ask for forgiveness as much and I wouldn't need to try and remedy disasters that could've been avoided had I done better.

More tact and diplomacy, along with the self-control.

More courage to do things I've always been too scared of trying, like swimming, riding a bicycle...

Increased speed and the ability to assimilate new actions quickly so I can start and finish work faster.

More time to visit and hang out with my older sister in the USA. Oh, and the cousins too, but not so much them as with Ate. X3

Meet Archfaith and my cosplay friend Mew Pudding in New York, and Pinksugarichigoalong with all the other gyaru in California. Hopefully I can do the latter when I go to the US.

Mahal with me right now and forever. Yes, I am thinking about marriage and raising a family. (Who'd have thought?)

Sunday, October 04, 2009

Hmm, my thoughts have become disjointed and incoherent and are going EVERYWHERE. I guess it's because I think based on emotions? This makes it so much harder to write them down.

So let's see... where did I leave off?

Oh yes. Now changing an entire mindset, which is perhaps the domino which will start the whole betterment and positive development movement, is the hardest to do. Mental conditioning is difficult to effect especially in the adult years, and it doesn't take a scientist to see that.

The Filipino is notorious for having amnesia of both long-term and short-term memory. We take the proverbs "Forgive and forget" and "Start fresh, start clean" a little too seriously. This is one of the saddest things about being Filipino - we, as a nation, forget too soon the grievous sins committed against our people and our country, whether by foreign parties or (and this is where it gets worse) fellow Filipinos ourselves. For starters, we suffered exactly 333 years of tyranny under Spain; today, Instituto Cervantes and the Catholic Church are still around (as much as I believe wholeheartedly in Christ Jesus, it is very sad that many figures in the Church have done things contrary to His teachings through the ages), IBM's Philippine unit hires and trains Filipino call center agents for accounts based in Spain and Latin America, many land, labour and governance problems rooted in politicking Spanish exiles and their way of "running the country" continue to plague us today, and I haven't even mentioned the controversial "Filipinas" biscuits which were said to have tasted good, save for their Oreo-like premise of dark cookies with white filling. Have the Spanish insulares and naturalised Filipinos originally from Spain helped the Philippines? Not really - the capitalist Zobel de Ayala family, for instance, have contributed to the rapid, technologically-driven Western-style development of Makati City, but they have also popularised mall culture and San Miguel Beer to new heights. No-one had heard a peep from them the moment the Ondoy/Ketsana hit, and one friend who found herself stranded in one of the low-end Ayala malls in Taguig City told me that the Ayala personnel were extremely lacking in compassion at the height of the storm.

Oh, alright, I take back my hatred of San Miguel Beer, but then again, I was never a beer drinker as I find it too bitter.

This kind of mental condition could only be sheer stupidity at best. But that is how my brain is conditioned. There is no avoiding it; after all, while my late grandparents fought in their own ways during the Japanese occupation during World War II, I can only be described as a rabid J-Pop fan who is a virtual slave to gyaru fashion. Except I refuse to forget, or at least I grasp at straws and devise ways to keep everything in my memory.

Trust me, it's not fun to focus on the negative like this. But the Filipino likes focusing more on the happy and pretty things than the sad and ugly ones. I know I prefer sleeping in the car than staring the greasy-skinned child wearing tattered clothes begging me to please buy a sampaguita garland, and I know I will much rather read my magazines, newspapers and books in English than the longwinded vernacular.

After the catastrophe that was Typhoon Ondoy (international name Ketsana), I've been thinking again. A lot.

And as we all know, the products of my thoughts will most likely be tiring to read as they are to write. Please bear with me; otherwise, you've been warned.

First, I regret sincerely that I was not more committed to the environmental effort. This was Mother Nature's epic bitching and ownage of the Filipino people, who I must admit have an attitude of being nice only when it works to our advantage. It used to be in our nature to live in total synchronicity with the environment's habits, but endless colonialisation and hurried industrialisation (the latter having been introduced to us by the Americans) have made myself and my countrymen inconsiderate of our surroundings and the other creatures that live in it.

Please note I am in no way generalizing the United States of America and its people, as well as the Philippines and her people. I am well aware that both countries have their own strengths, and that indolence and irresponsibility know no race, no religion and even no gender. It's just that... somehow, I wish we Filipinos were able to figure out what the Americans were so good at doing, and then do one better by surpassing them instead of just following their lead, or worse, bickering among ourselves. Those are two Filipino traits that peeve me - bickering and blaming, especially because we Filipinos are happy to always rely on other people to take on the tasks that we ourselves should be doing and are natural debaters when we find an opposing perspective. More on this later.

Anyway, it used to be that we in the Philippines had natural treasures, "likas na yaman", that we were very proud of as a people - tall, swaying coconut trees that reached to the sky, crystal-clear bodies of water, wide-eyed tarsiers on Chocolate Hills. After all, we have always been the Pearl of the Orient Seas. But the concern that many of us have these days is to be rich through any means possible - even if that entails making colleagues look bad in front of our bosses, cutting more trees to build more living (as opposed to livable) spaces, and throwing our trash just about anywhere because we're in a hurry to get to work. In fact, immediately after the onslaught of Ondoy in our metropolis, my friends retold in Facebook how the drivers who made public transportation possible were mindlessly throwing their trash outside their windows. It's a shame, considering I actually did join an environmentally-driven organisation. Of course, since I wasn't passionate about the cause (I've always been more civic-minded), I hardly got anything done. I did practise proper disposal and segregation of waste, but I've always been queasy around animals. Even now I'm not exactly a pet-friendly person. To be fair, my fast-paced working gal lifestyle doesn't allow for pets at all; I hardly even have time for myself these days. But I admit that privately, I always held much disapproval and disappointment for people who spend so much to groom and even dress their animals in human-like clothing when so many people outside were dying of hunger and lack of shelter and medicines. What's worse are those people who like keeping animals and yet do not take care of them responsibly - and make no mistake, we have a lot of them here.

I honestly think that many of my own people, myself included, really do not have a sense of responsibility. I do not bother to reduce the clutter of my own room because I am lazy, because I know that I can always rely on my mother, who prefers to see everything tidy, to clean everything up for me. (I'm very sorry Mum, I will get to that long-awaited clean-up once I'm done with this entry.) I do not lobby for more tree-lined parks and pedestrian lanes in Makati because I leave the planning for these to our city government, which has many staffers who admittedly do not have the foresight to see the benefits of these things. I do not complain about the massive logging in my mother's mountainous hometown of Rizal, Laguna, because again that's the provincial government's work; besides, we're based in Manila now, and there are some greedy relatives there who we'd rather not see.

It won't be easy, but I will have to change my mindset and make myself accountable for causing the floods brought by Ondoy to a certain extent.

PS this show of mercy and accountability to the environment will not be extended to mosquitos, flies and cockroaches though. They're disgusting and carry diseases on them no matter what they do. Ugh. XP